Notes on Using BaseCamp

Several months ago we were sticked to pure project management tools, like Microsoft Project. Yes, it is great to see Gantt and organize tasks in a hierarchy, but, you know, we, managers and engineers in Shift Labs, need some collaboration features. For sure, it's not just about Shift Labs :), but other IT and non-IT companies who manage projects.

Collaboration matters. Let's say I want to assign task to a person, which will be notified via email and, once it will be finished, some kind of check box marking or drag'n'drop operation will occur and, voola, we have some task history, some progress! Discussing project issues via email is normal, but, it's better to handle messaging in one place, not throughout email boxes of involved engineers. And we need wiki. And we need bug tracking. Documents? Yes, diagrams, screenshots, designs, etc. It is great to have one tool for that, not many. It is awesome to have native support of project components/modules and releases. Calendar and events are also essential. And it should be web-based of course, no Microsoft Project + Groove alternative is accepted.

So, we started using BaseCamp. What I personally liked in BaseCamp from the very first moments was its clean and neat interface. Easy-to-use one. Pages are not heavy and overwhelming. But that's the minor thing ...

Now about tasks and organizing the work. Each project may have many to-do items, grouped in to-do lists. The first bad thing for me: no hierarchies! I would like to create tasks and sub-tasks and then sub-tasks again, but not this time. To-do item itself is a very "tiny" entity: you can give it a name, assign a person (ONLY ONE, by the way) responsible for resolution and ... that's it! No due dates, no multiple assignments. To-do item doesn't have description. To-do list has it instead. Milestones live outside the to-do lists and to-dos, but one can associate to-do list and milestone. This specific made me create to-do lists and milestones with the same name and then associate the two.

Lack of product version support in BaseCamp became pain very soon. In order to handle the staff for our Pre Alpha, Alpha and Beta versions of the product, we simply created separate projects. An alternative approach would be to create one project, but in this case to-do page is polluted with lots of items and becomes unusable. Besides you have no intuitive and normal way to find out which item belongs to which version.

BaseCamp provides possibility to create writeboards. Writeboard is very similar to wiki article, but more limited in features then basic wiki. Article versions and version comparison are supported. Users may post comments to the writeboard. Available formatting options are not great but sufficient for non-complex articles and formatting guide is always at hand. By the way, it would be great to associate writeboard to a to-do item or to-do list, but BaseCamp doesn't support that. Good news is that you can import the writeboard created earlier, specifying the URL and password.

I found messaging system in BaseCamp sufficient for our needs. User specifies the title of the message, writes the body and optionally extended body, assign the category of the message. It is possible to attach files and notify subset of the people on the project. Ability to associate message to a milestone is a good feature and I found it useful. Besides, one can preview the mesage before sending it.

Chat is one of the features which we didn't try yet. Somehow we used to "skype chat" each other instead or just use aural communication. Still, I am sure that it is great feature. I would even say it is a mistake that we passed it through ...

Document management is easy and supports versioning. However, absence of project versions also affected the way we managed documents. There were documents generic for the project and specific to the version of the project. Not to lose generic documentation we created separate project for handling them.

So, BaseCamp is a good tool to use for small agile projects. It is really easy and user-friendly. Still, task management is too primitive. No native support for project versions, multiple assignments, task due dates and events makes the tool insufficient for use very soon. At least in my case.